beaTunes News

Friday, August 17, 2007

beaTunes 1.2.2 is out

beaTunes LogoWe are glad to announce the release of beaTunes 1.2.2. This latest release of the popular iTunes library management tool features a number of bug fixes for both OS X and Windows. If you are already using an earlier version, we recommend to update.

Thanks to all of our users who helped testing this version and gave us highly appreciated feedback.

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posted at 08:26 0 comments

Monday, August 13, 2007

1.2.2 Development Snapshot 1

beaTunes LogoWith the use of CoreAudio in the latest beaTunes release, many things changed and some didn't work out as well as others. Since it makes little sense to release a full update every two days, we decided to post one or more development snapshots before the actual 1.2.2 version. These snapshots aren't full releases and usually they will popup a dialog saying that you should update. Just ignore that dialog.

And even though these snapshots are really just snapshots, we will make sure that they don't contain any blatant bugs that could screw you.

If you are experiencing problems with beaTunes - be it crashes or that things simply don't work as expected - please try one of these:

The snapshot fixes issues with changes from inspections not being stored in iTunes on Windows and crashes that occurred on OS X when analyzing mono files.

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posted at 19:47 0 comments

Friday, August 10, 2007

Micro Update

beaTunes LogoWe are happy to say that we had a great response to our recent beaTunes 1.2 release. Many, many people tried beaTunes for the first time and loved it.

Unfortuntely, some of them were a little disappointed, because they ran into a bug that we didn't catch before the release. It's one of those that only shows up under certain conditions, that are hard to simulate when developing. In this case, it was the combination of certain analysis tasks, configured in a specific way and combined with already existing data in the track that people wanted to analyze. The symptom of the bug was a beaTunes crash. We are sorry, that we didn't see this one coming, but that's just how software development works.

Anyhow, we fixed it, posted an updated version (1.2.1) on our site and highly recommend OS X users to install it.

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posted at 10:59 0 comments

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Fullscreen Charts

Fullscreen album chartsFor quite some time beaTunes had the album charts feature - basically displaying the album covers of the 70 albums with the highest Amazon salesrank. Of course you could choose a specific genre and the displayed genres and charts depended on the Amazon store you configured in beaTunes' general preferences. Something many people might have never noticed - the charts also automatically update themselves every hour.

So, what's so great about this? - you might ask. Well, we think it looks plain cool. And to make it look even better we added the fullscreen mode in beaTunes 1.2. By hitting that little button in the upper right corner, you can see the charts in their full beauty on your whole screen.

To make things even better, we also improved the mouse-over popups. They now feature the star ratings and if available the whole Amazon review.

Fullscreen album charts with review popupClick on the images to see larger screenshots (800x600). Like it?

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posted at 16:21 0 comments

Server under load!

beaTunes LogoUsually I love to report that we have many many people downloading our software. Today though, it seems like it's a couple too many. Our server is making funny noises, download times for individuals are getting longer and sometimes the server doesn't even respond in a timely fashion. To ease the problem, we ask people to download the OS X version of beaTunes from download.com, rather than beatunes.com. The software is exactly the same.

Thank you for your help!

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posted at 09:48 0 comments

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

beaTunes 1.2 released

beaTunes LogoAfter quite a few micro updates, we are happy to announce the availability of beaTunes 1.2. The new version is an overall improved version of what you already know and like: Plainly spoken, one of the best iTunes library management tools around.

The list of little things that we improved or fixed is quite long - we will therefore not list all of them here (if you're curious, most changes are listed in the Notes.txt file that comes with the release). But let's talk about the bigger changes...

Faster Analysis

We spent quite some time on making audio analysis faster on OS X and are quite pleased with the results. On a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo the analysis of just the BPM is about 1.6x faster than it used to be with beaTunes 1.1.7, when processing tasks sequentially. Now, many of you know that beaTunes can process more than one task in parallel on multicore machines. You just need to open the Preferences, go to Analysis and increase the number of tasks, then restart beaTunes.

What happens when you have beaTunes process two tasks in parallel on the same machine? That's right, it gets faster. More than twice as fast as processing two tasks in parallel with beaTunes 1.1.7. In other words, our performance improvements scale much better than what beaTunes used to offer. The more processors/cores, the faster it gets. In our limited experiment, beaTunes scaled almost linearly, i.e. the same number of tracks where analyzed twice as fast when doubling the number of tasks to be processed in parallel.

Automatic Track Identification

Do you have any tracks that are named 01-Track.mp3? From ripping offline or simply from before CDDB and freedb were all the rage? If so, beaTunes can now help you out. We integrated a feature called MusicDNS by MusicIP. It lets you compute an acoustic fingerprint that can be used to look up some basic data like artist, title and PUID (a PUID is basically a number that can in turn be used to look up metadata on websites like MusicBrainz). beaTunes uses this to automatically import metadata for those ill-named tracks. Furthermore, we use the data for a nifty autocorrection feature. Much like a spellchecker, beaTunes can now make you aware of different spellings or missing information in its Get Info dialog.

Let There Be Babel

The last major feature I'd like to mention here, is the improved support for lyrics and languages. You all know that iTunes has the ability to store lyrics for each track. Unfortunately, there is still no legal way to automatically fetch lyrics from some web service. We decided to offer two features:

  1. A Google Lyrics button
  2. A lyrics language analyzer

The button (located on the Lyrics pane in the Get Info dialog) does exactly what you would think it should do - it opens your browser and googles for the lyrics of the selected song. At this point you are of course free to copy the lyrics from some website and paste it into the lyrics fields. Once you have the lyrics, the lyrics language analyzer is capable of determining what language the lyrics are in (if it is a western European language). This can be useful for ordering songs or creating play/matchlists in just one language. Since not everybody has time to google the lyrics for each and every track, there is a fallback mechanism that simply looks at the titles of all tracks on an album.

And...

Well, that's the most important stuff... Of course there are also new background themes, new blogstyles, new and improved inspectors etc.

We hopy you enjoy the new version.

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posted at 15:46 0 comments